You can contact Dennis at: DSmith7136@msn.com

   

      My sons have strived to make our Father’s Day fishing trips into something of a family tradition in recent years but, due to conflicting job schedules, unsettled weather patterns, high country road closures, family responsibilities and surprise domestic conspiracies, we seldom get to celebrate the occasion until much later in the year. Typically, we’ll start planning the mission around mid May, but we’re seldom able to actually pull it off much before late July or early August.

     In years past we’ve concentrated our trouting expeditions in the high country, sleeping in tent camps while bushwhacking small streams, meadow creeks and beaver ponds for brookies and cutts, but this year we’re hauling my oldest son’s big camper to North Park for an extended weekend of stillwater fly fishing - the idea of which is to try to hook up with some of The Delaney Lakes’ trophy sized rainbows and brown trout, some of which can weigh up 8 pounds and more. We may use some of the off hours to scout for deer and elk on nearby Independence Mountain.

     Our backcountry brookie camps aren’t primitive by any means - we pitch a large, 2-room cabin-style tent for sleeping quarters and supplement it with one of those accordion-framed, “easy-up” overhead tarps to shelter the kitchen, grill, camp table and lounging area. The requisite campfire ring completes the picture. They’ve all been quite comfortable as tent camps go, but Dave’s 40 foot, self-contained, air-conditioned, 5^th wheel camper with hot and cold running water, flush toilet, shower, full kitchen and a color TV with surround sound is positively decadent by comparison - and, considering the hordes of blood sucking insects infesting North Park this time of year, probably a far wiser choice.

     All three of the Delaney Lakes can be as persnickety as any trout water in the country, which is to say there are days when you’d swear there wasn’t a trout in any of them and then, a day later, the fish will feed with such ravenous gluttony you could almost catch them on a cigar butt lashed to a size 8 Eagle Claw bait hook.

     In my limited experience, the North Lake seems to be the most temperamental of the three, but it also holds the largest fish which somehow seems fair. The South Lake produces exceptional hatches of large chironomids in the spring, damselflies and Callibaetis mayflies through the summer, and in the fall, big October caddis - or Traveling Lake Sedges as they’re sometimes called. We call them “motorboat” caddis for the peculiar way they scurry around on the surface immediately upon hatching. It drives the trout crazy. All three lakes are fairly crawling with scuds, crawfish, minnows and leeches. While good fishing can sometimes be had through the day, the biggest browns, rainbows and cutt-bow hybrids are most active after dark - and so are the mosquitoes.

 

   Dennis Smith is an Outdoor Writer and Photographer. His articles and photos have appeared in numerous outdoor publications, catalogs and newspapers. Dennis can be reached at (970) 669-6074. Want to know more about Dennis?

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